What Leaders Read

Empty Your Cup

excerpt from: The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari – A Fable About Fulfilling Your Dreams & Reaching Your Destiny by Robin S. Sharma

Julian remained calm and patient in the face of my persistence. Spotting the pot of tea I had left on the table next to him, he started to pour into my waiting cup. He poured until the cup was full – but then he kept on pouring! Tea started to trickle down the sides of the cup and into the saucer, then onto my wife’s prized Persian rug. At first I watched silently. Then I couldn’t take it any more.

“Julian, what are you doing? My cup is overflowing. No matter how hard you try, no more will go in!” I yelled impatiently.

He looked at me for a long moment. “Please don’t take this the wrong way. I really respect you, John. I always have. However, just like this cup, you seem to be full of your own ideas. And how can any more go in… until you first empty your cup?”

I was struck by the truth of his words. He was right. My many years in the conservative legal world, doing the same things every day with the same people who thought the same thoughts every day had filled my cup to the brim. My wife Jenny was always telling me that we should be meeting new people and exploring new things. “I wish, you were just a little more adventurous, John,” she would say.

I couldn’t remember the last time I had read a book that didn’t deal with law. The profession was my life. I began to realize that the sterile world I had grown accustomed to had dulled my creativity and limited my vision.

“Okay, I see your point,” I admitted. “Perhaps all my years as a trial lawyer have made me a hardened skeptic. From the minute I saw you in my office yesterday, something deep inside me told me that your transformation was genuine, and that there was some sort of lesson in it for me. Maybe I just didn’t want to believe it.”

“ John, tonight is the first night of your new life. I simply ask that you think deeply about the wisdom and strategies that I will share with you and apply them with conviction for a period of one month. Embrace the methods with a deep trust in their effectiveness. There is a reason why they have survived for thousands of years – they work,”

“One month seems like a long time.”

“Six hundred and seventy-two hours of inner work to profoundly improve every waking moment of the rest of your life is quite a bargain, don’t you think? Investing in yourself is the best investment you will ever make. It will not only improve your life, it will improve the lives of all those around you.”

“How’s that?”

“It is only when you have mastered the art of loving yourself that you can truly love others. It’s only when you have opened your own heart that you can touch the heart of others. When you feel centered and alive, you are in a much better position to be a better person.”